vDef-Web: A Case-Study on Building a Science Gateway Around a Research Code
Conferences
Overview
Overview
abstract
Many research codes assume a user’s proficiency
with high-performance computing tools, which often hinders
their adoption by a community of users. Our goal is to create
a user-friendly gateway to allow such users to leverage new capabilities brought forward to the fracture mechanics community
by the phase-field approach to fracture, implemented in the open
source code vDef.
We leveraged popular existing tools for building such frameworks: Agave, Django, and Docker, to build a Science Gateway
that allows a user to submit a large number of jobs at once.
We use the Agave framework to run jobs and handle all
communications with the high-performance computers, as well
as data sharing and tracking of provenance. Django was used to
create a web application. Docker provided an easily deployable
image of the system, simplifying setup by the user.
The result is a system that masks all interactions with the highperformance computing environment and provides a graphical
interface that makes sense for scientists. In the common situation
of parameter sweeps our gateway also helps the scientists
comparing outputs of various computations using a matrix view
that links to individual computations.
Index Terms—Agave, high-performance computing, graphical
user interface, science gateway, parameter sweep, phase-field
models, fracture mechanics
